Alexander Darwall has pledged not to let the weighting to a single stock get so high after disappointing share price performance in payments business Wirecard.
The German fintech company reached up to 17% of the European Opportunities Trust but its poor stock performance has seen that weighting fall to 10.8% in the latest factsheet for the investment trust.
Darwall is in the early days of establishing his European equities boutique after his surprise exit from Jupiter in July 2019. In October 2019, the board of the Jupiter European Opportunities trust announced it was following the star fund manager to his new firm, Devon Equity Management.
In a video uploaded to the Devon Equity Management website, Darwall apologised to investors for having too much allocation to the digital payments business.
He said he had discussed the stock with the board. “I’ve explained to them how we’re going to work through this issue. We won’t have such a big holding in an individual stock again,” he said in the interview with Asset.tv.
The next largest weightings in the investment trust are 9.7% in Novo Nordisk and 9.2% in RELX.
The trust aims to have around 35 to 40 companies, Darwall said.
In the video, Darwall outlined the company’s two-year plan to “repay the confidence shown by two core clients that came with us”. The boutique fund house may launch a small Sicav for an additional institutional client.
He is joined at Devon Equity Management by senior fund manager Luca Emo, a former colleague from Jupiter, with Richard Pavry as chief executive. Former Standard Life Aberdeen chairman Simon Troughton heads up the board as non-executive chairman of Devon Equity Management.
Pavry had previously been head of investment trusts at Jupiter but left to join Darwall. Jupiter’s loss of the European Opportunites trust swiped virtually all closed-ended assets from the FTSE 250 asset manager.
European Opportunities Trust top-10 holdings
| Wirecard | 10.8% |
| Novo Nordisk | 9.7% |
| RELX | 9.2% |
| Experian | 8.6% |
| Deutsche Boerse | 7% |
| Intermediate Capital Group | 6.3% |
| Adidas | 6% |
| Grenke | 5.7% |
| Dassault Systemes | 5.6% |
| Gearing | 8.8% |
